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ABRAHAM 


LINCOLM 


i*AN HISTORI ' 


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ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



AN HISTORICAL ADDRESS. 



By Walter P. Beckwith, 

Principal of the State Normal School at Salem^ Mass. 



PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR 
1903. 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGKtSS, 

Two Copies Received 

APR 9 1903 

„Copyrignt tncry 

CLASS CX XXc. N©. 

COPY B. 



.8 



Copyright, igo^. 
By Walter P. Beckwith. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



Historical characters are like books. The really great 
books are few in number, — neither are they easily distin- 
guished at their appearance. Occasionally one excites a great 
commotion ; everybody is reading and talking of it ; the cir- 
culating libraries can hardly supply the demand. In a few 
weeks, — at longest, a few months, — the interest is gone ; 
the book is forgotten. Once in ten years, a book appears 
whose usefulness and popularity steadily increase for a 
time ; it endures for a generation. But how few are known 
or read now that were printed a hundred years ago ! All 
are forgotten, — save one in a million. They have done 
their work; they have played for a brief time their little 
parts in the world's drama : they are found only upon the 
highest shelves and in the most distant alcoves of antiquari- 
an libraries. 

So with men. How many who have been voters for thirty 
years can recite the names of the governors of this state for 
that time? Yet at each election, your interest has been 
keen ; sometimes it has been intense ; occasionally absorbing 
and thrilling ; and these names, now forgotten, have been 
fresh in your thoughts and ready upon your lips. But the 
recollections of living contemporaries become fainter and 
fainter, — the associations are destroyed, — the occurrences 



of a generation ago become dim in memory ; young men and 
women grow up to whom the great men and the ^reat deeds 
of other times are only stories ; and, one by one, the great 
mass of the actors of other days sink into oblivion, and find 
their burial within the leaves of the biographical dictionary. 

Then so much depends upon the " point of view." In 
this regard, men are like mountains. A height of land 
towers over our heads ; is it a mountain, splitting the clouds, 
and joining the earth and the sky ; or is it a mere knoll, 
shutting from our view the real peaks which are just beyond 
it ? In a deep and narrow valley, one has no idea how some 
mighty peak dominates the whole landscape for miles and 
miles. But when he gets away upon the other summits, he 
sees at once how easily it is the master and king of the en- 
tire region. 

I repeat — so with men. We do not judge the public men 
of our own time with intelligence even, — let alone fairness 
and candor. No man, it is said, is a hero to his own valet. 
The genuine greatness or the essential littleness of those who 
figure largely in the world's affairs is not clearly perceived 
in their own times. To illustrate by familiar examples : 
how have the contemporary estimates of Daniel Webster 
and of Charles Sumner changed since their deaths. You 
all know how John A. Andrew is reckoned to-day ; but in 
1862, there was a strong opposition to his re-election, even 
within his own party, and no less a man than Charles Dev- 
ens was made the candidate of dissatisfied republicans, and 
of democrats eager to profit by the dissensions of their oppo- 
nents. 



At rare intervals, there appears upon the stage of human 
affairs, a man, whose life and deeds and character compel the 
attention, the admiration, and the lasting affection of the 
world. His is " one of the few, the immortal names, that 
were not born to die." Generations come and generations 
go; but his memory, living and green, does not fade. 
Parties rise and fall ; but his name becomes a household 
word, dear to the hearts and the lips of his countrymen. 
Great issues are settled so that the settlements mark clear 
gains for human progress ; his fortunes had been married to 
those great principles and his fame is forever linked with 
their triumph. His services, too carelessly estimated during 
his life-time,— his motives, often lightly aspersed by the 
thoughtless and the ignorant; his relations to progress and 
truth, so rarely understood by his fellow-citizens, particular- 
ly when they seemed to threaten the triumph of some party 
Qr sect, — these at last become evident. Then he receives 
the place in history to which he is entitled ; his services, his 
motives and his various merits bring him again the happy 
experience of the modest guest, and the muse of history is 
constantly inviting him to " come up higher." 

The attention of the busy world is caught and held. The 
friends, who knew him best, record, all too tardily and scan- 
tily, what they can recall. He was many-sided : no one of 
his associates apprehended all the manifestations of his 
character ; soon authorities are disputing whose view is reli- 
able and whose estimate is correct. He has been an actor 
in complicated and perplexing situations, amid which no 
human being could possibly have taken a course and formed 



judgments such as would have been taken and formed by 
even one of a hundred critics of human character and action. 
Hence what one approves, another condemns ; where this 
man sees the brightness of noon, another catches only the 
darkness of midnight ; the act which appears to me only a 
rightful exertion of lawful authority is to my neighbor arro- 
gant and over-bearing tyranny ; one of us sees and considers 
one circumstance at a given time or a single set of circum- 
stances and judges that or these to be the key to the situa- 
tion, while another deems them exceedingly trivial and 
attaches the chief importance to another course of events. 
So, always to some extent, and often to a great extent, the 
haze of uncertainty and doubt gathers about the hero, and 
the mystery is made so deep that unanimous agreement is 
impossible. 

The wise man, in studying the career and character of 
famous personages will endeavor to brush away, so far as he 
may, the mist and cobweb of detail and of separate compar- 
atively petty acts, and to find, if he can, the master-key 
which unlocks the secret places of the great man's personali- 
ty. 

We are to deal with one of the most conspicuous 
characters of human history, — a character, which, as it seems 
to me, is destined to receive, in the future, constantly more 
and more the attention and the scrutiny of the world. It 
was given to Abraham Lincoln, as it has been given to few 
men in the history of the world, to personify a great cause. 
In its success or failure was bound up, whether the fact was 
recognized or not, very much more than the mere existence 



of the Union. The progress of that contest, by the very 
logic of its events, made him the glad exponent of human 
freedom, without distinction of race or color. In this 
solemn and awful station, with a heroism as real as that of 
the o^enerals and soldiers who followed the flao- where can- 
nons roared and danger was manifest, with a fidelity which 
never wearied and a wisdom which is becoming more and 
more the wonder and the admiration of men, he stood for 
four years, as the head and the heart of this nation and the 
representative and champion of that principle of self-govern- 
ment " which should not perish from the earth." It was 
also given to this civilian to be the most illustrious martyr of 
that cause. This crowning sacrifice evoked the sympathy 
of even his *' erring brethren," and softened, m no small 
degree, the bitterness of their defeat. Splendid as was his 
life, it may be that in his death he rendered his greatest 
service to his country. 

If one should attempt merely to trace the political career 
of Abraham Lincoln, during its continuance of thirty years, 
— to make measurably clear the skiU with which he inter- 
preted the sentiments and the purposes of the " plain people," 
(of whom, as he said, the Lord must be very fond, because 
he makes so many of them,) — to set forth the patience and 
the courage of his struggle, — to decipher the finesse with 
which he threaded his way, quietly, steadily, triumphantly, 
through a labyrinth of perplexing entanglement, — such a 
task would be comparatively easy. 

But if one goes back to his birth, and undertakes to esti- 
mate the sources and the strength of the various forces 



8 

which combined to produce him, — the individual he was, — 
to apportion to Paritan ancestry and Quaker environment, 
to the admixture of " poor white " blood, to the possible re- 
plenishing of an exhausted line of descent from a source 
which cannot be determined, to the shiftlessness and the im- 
provident example of his father, to the somewhat uncertain 
influence of a mother who scarcely lived to see him emerge 
from childhood, to the wholesome and healthy care of a step- 
mother who deserves at least as much recognition as she has 
ever received, to a constantly shifting habitat beyond the 
outskirts of civilization, — if one, I say, begins the task with 
the determination of being thorough in this sense, — to the 
end that he may produce a psychological explanation of the 
greatness of this man, he may well despair of success. 

For the difficulties at which I have briefly hinted increase 
rather than diminish as the study progresses. We can 
fairly well understand the environment of his early years, — 
but the fact of understanding increases rather than lessens 
our perplexity. Our chief difficulty does not arise from the 
disagreement of witnesses ; that is often encountered, and, 
helps to complicate the problem. But we find Lincoln living 
until 1840, in a section where were combined, as such a 
zone always combines, the vices of the old and the limitations 
of the new ; and, for our lives, we cannot, with confidence 
and candor, assert that he was, in any extraordinary degree, 
apparently above or in advance of his surroundings. 

Yet we get some hints of better things. For, while hi& 
opportunity for attending school was next to nothing, he was 
an eager reader of such books as fell into his hands ; and 



9 

fortunately, perhaps, for him, books were not so plenty in 
those days as they are at present, and those he read did a 
great deal for him. He was somewhat touched by the vices 
of his surroundings ; but, while he was of enormous physical 
strength, though of most ungainly awkwardness, and while 
few were his equals in personal encounter, he did not care 
for fighting and did not wantonly exercise his power. He 
drank but little, in a section and at a time when whiskey 
was resrarded as one of the necessities of life. He was kind- 
ly of spirit, easy in his disposition, obliging in habit, rather 
disinclined to perform physical labor, quaint and homely in 
his manner of speech, with a tenacious memory, and of the 
most simple-hearted, matt er-of-course, and transparent hon- 
esty. 

Very certainly, his was an active mind. By nature, he 
was apparently not attracted, — that is, by nature, as the 
term is commonly employed. It is a most interesting 
feature of his speeches, — and I ask you to verify my state- 
ment as you have opportunity, for I do not recall seeing the 
fact noted elsewhere, — that one rarely, if ever, finds in them 
illustrations or metaphors drawn from the trees and flowers, 
or from the fields and streams. Yet he lived, all his boy- 
hood and youth, in the very midst of an almost virgin 
wilderness, where nature, little troubled by man, bore full 
sway. 

As I read the story of his life and growth, I find the secret 
of his great success in his intimate sympathy with and under- 
standing of the People. " He offered," says Emereon, « no 
shining qualities at the first encounter ; he did not offend by 



lO 

superiority. He had a face and luaniier which disarmed 
suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good- 
will." He early won a hold upon the people which he 
never lost. His first election to the legislature was from a 
strong democratic district ; as a candidate before the people 
he was defeated only once. The attachment of the people 
to him came at last to be a matter of affection and instinct. 
In them he found his stimulus and his inspiration. He 
never came to have what would be called a comprehensive 
knowledge of public affairs as we are bound to estimate the 
knowledge of public men. His lore was the knowledge of 
men. His anecdotes deal with persons. His illustrations, — 
and what other public character ever employed such a 
wealth of illustration, either in number or pertinency? — 
are drawn from human experience. But his wdt, effective 
and keen, did not take the form of repartee, and it left no 
sting behind. He delighted in parable and anecdote. His 
sense of the ridiculous was so keen that it often served him 
as a refuge in the midst of difficulties and perplexities which 
otherwise might have overwhelmed him. He hailed Arte- 
mus Ward and Petroleum Y. Nasby as benefactors of the 
human race. No witticism escaped his keen appreciation. 
Naturally, in literature, his greatest admiration was reserved 
for its greatest master in characterizing the faculties, passions, 
and quips of the human mind, — for Shakespeare, who, so 
incredibly more than any other writer, knew '' what was in 
man," and the choice passages of the great dramatist were en- 
tirely within his command. As an advocate, his strength lay 
in his wonderful power of simple and clear statement ; he was 



II 

able at once to divest the issue of all unimportant and per- 
plexing details and make evident the real point at stake. In 
the later years of his life, the lighter qualities of his style were 
overshadowed by a growing seriousness and solemnity, and 
his speech fell into a tone of simple and majestic grandeur, 
so that it may be truthfully said that this unlettered man 
has furnished the world with models of English prose, 
worthy to be ranked with that of Milton, and Bacon, and 
Emerson, and King James's Bible. 

I do not intend to recite, in detail, the events of his life : 
so I pass over the story of his early political career, of his 
membership in the Illinois legislature, of his service in the 
Black Hawk war, of his single term in Congress, of his 
struggles at the bar, of his triumphs and defeats as a politi- 
cian, of the cheerful readiness with which, " for the good of 
the cause," he surrendered his ambition to be a United States 
senator when Lyman Trumbull was finally chosen, of his 
great campaign against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, and of 
his nomination and election to the presidency in 1860. To 
these matters, at least to some of them, we shall have occa- 
sion to refer, — we shall use them not for purposes of narra- 
tion but of illustration and explanation. What he had 
become in all those years of labor and discipline, we will let 
the story of 1861-65 show. 

Such as he Avas, he came to the time of his trial. With less 
official experience than any civilian who had previously en- 
tered upon the presidency, — with absolutely no experience in 
any executive position,- — Abraham Lincoln stood before the 
American people on the 4th of March, 1861, and swore to do 



12 

his duty and maintain the constitution. Seven states had 
already seceded. The Confederate government was fully 
organized. North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkan- 
sas were on the verge of withdrawal, and the governor of 
each was exerting all his influence to that end. Maryland, 
Kentucky, Missouri, and, to a less extent, Delaware, were 
torn by the contest between the opposing factions. The 
city of Washington was honey-combed with secession in- 
fluences and almost daily emissaries of the Montgomery 
government came and went freely. The entire social life of 
the capital was tainted with the virus of unfaithfulness. 
The treasury was practically empty and the credit of the 
government at a low ebb. The departments were full of 
secession sympathizers. There was no navy worth the 
mention ; such as there was had been scattered to the four 
quarters of the globe. The regular army, only a handful 
of men at the best, was an uncertain and unknown quantity, 
and hundreds of its officers, educated at West Point, had 
already resigned to " go with their states ;" of those who 
remained no man knew who could be trusted. The resources 
of the government adapted to the prosecution of war had been 
scattered or put within easy reach of the secessionists. The 
forts and navy-yards in the seceded states had been seized 
and their contents appropriated by the leaders of the rebel- 
lion. Communication with the capital by the loyal states 
was possible only through an unreliable, even if not actually 
hostile country ; Mr. Lincoln himself had come thither by an 
unexpected and secret journey in the night-time, to avoid a 
danger which was believed at least to be real. 



13 

It is hard to see what more could have been done or 
omitted by the out-going administration to increase the 
difficulty of the situation. The position had indeed been a 
most trying one for Mr. Buchanan and his advisers, — even 
had they been united and determined to maintain, at any 
cost, the integrity of the Union. The president himself was 
advanced in years and feeble in body. A -man of unsullied 
personal character, whose public service had been long and 
in the main honorable, he had always been of those, (as Mr. 
Blaine most pertinently points out,) who are excellent in 
counsel but comparatively feeble in action. During his ad- 
ministration he had most unfortunately allied himself with 
the wrong side in the dissensions which finally wrecked his 
party, and had permitted himself to be made a mere cat's- 
paw of the Southern democrats in the Kansas iniquity and 
the resulting warfare upon Senator Douglas. After the 
forced withdrawal of the secession members of his cabinet, 
he had yielded to the influence of Black, Dix, and Stanton, 
who at least kept him from doing more harm. The net 
result of it all was that he did nothing, either to avert or to 
lessen the horror of the coming storm. 

It has often been said that Buchanan might have done 
what Jackson had done in nullification times and have crushed 
the whole secession movement at a single blow. But Jack- 
son had only South Carolina to deal with ; the southern 
people had not then been accustomed to the talk of secession 
and of northern hostility to their interests, as manifested in 
the triumph of a party having substantially its entire strength 
in the North. These facts make a vast difference. Further- 



14 

more, they had become accustomed to underestimating the 
North. For myself, I am pretty firmly convinced that any 
attempt to deal with the situation as Jackson did in 1832 
would have hurried the border states into secession, and that 
Mr. Lincoln would not have been inaugurated in Washington, 
if, indeed, his election had ever been constitutionally de- 
clared by the two houses of Congress. 

Not that Buchanan and his advisers foresaw this. But 
the weak and vacillating course of the president is easily ac- 
counted for by his natural timidity, his advanced age, the 
superstitious regard for precedents which often grows up in 
the minds of men long in public .office, the personal hold 
which some of the prominent southern leaders in the cabinet 
and in Congress had exercised upon him throughout his ad- 
ministration, so that he had been made whether willingly or 
unwillingly a prominent factor in the disruption of his own 
party and the consequent easy election of Mr. Lincoln. Not 
all the uncertainty and vacillation in those days is to be 
charged to Mr. Buchanan. Neither house of Congress, 
neither party nor any faction in either house, could deter- 
mine to what extent it was willing to compromise the differ- 
ences between North and South, — or, if so, what it was 
willing to concede to such an end. The mayor of New 
York gravely proposed that it should become a " free city," 
after certain European models. The tone of Horace Gree- 
ley's Tribune, by far the most influential newspaper at that 
time in the country, — contributed to the general uncertainty. 

Again, it is far from certain that it would have been well, 
in the long run, if the rebellion had been nipped in the bud 



15 

by a sharp and decisive stroke. The union would indeed 
have been saved, for the time being, if such a stroke could 
have been made successfully. But slavery would have been 
left ; and we can see now, if men could not see then, that any 
settlement of the difficulty which left slavery in existence, 
could only put off, not avert forever, the awful struggle. 

For we shall err greatly if we think of and judge the civil 
war to have been merely the outcome of a limited, cheap, 
and vulgar conspiracy. It was preceded, indeed, by con- 
spiracy ; it was accompanied by vulgar and disgraceful 
intrigue ; its initiation and its progress were attended by all 
the incidents which commonly accompany great national con- 
vulsions. But it was not dependent for its inception or its 
support upon the ability or the wickedness of any one man, 
or even of any one set of men. If Jefferson Davis had not 
lived at all, or if he had died upon the battle-fields of Mexi- 
co before the slavery conflict had reached an acute stage, we 
should still at some time have had the war. I should not 
take the trouble to combat the hypothesis of a limited con- 
spiracy, but it does not account for all the facts, — it is not 
comprehensive, it is unphilosophical, because it is so incom- 
plete. 

The truth is 'that the war was a conflict between two 
entirely distinct and incompatible forms of civilization, — 
each mighty in its fashion, each with some splendid qualities 
of one sort and another, each with valiant and loyal champions, 
each with certain advantages in the prosecution of the great 
struggle. There was a right side, and there was a wrong 
side ; but these qualities of right and wrong did not depend 



i6 

upon the fact that one side stood for the integrity and the 
other for the dismemberment of a great nation, or even upon 
the fact that certain men who had sworn allegiance to the 
flag and the constitution had broken their oaths. 

The cause of the North was right because there was in 
fact an " irrepressible conflict " between freedom and slavery^ 
and because the cause of freedom became so bound up with 
the cause of the North that both must triumph or fail 
together. There were few, even after the war had begun, 
who understood how profoundly this was true ; before the 
war, there were practically none. Even in the convention 
which nominated Mr. Lincoln for the presidency, a motion 
to incorporate in the platform the words of the declaration 
of independence that " all men are created free and equal " 
was once voted down ; and the convention was only recalled 
to a realization of its blunder by one of the soul-stirring 
and illuminating speeches of George William Curtis. 

I have thus dwelt at considerable length upon the situation 
which faced Mr. Lincoln at his inauguration, and upon the 
real nature of the struggle between the North and the South. 
I have done so because it seems to me we are too prone to 
consider the events of history as separate and distinct, in- 
stead of trying to trace the relations of one to others, as 
cause and effect. I am not speaking as the apologist of th& 
Buchanan administration. The fact that it did nothing is 
its just and severest condemnation. But I believe the war 
had to come ; and, once begun, it was inevitable, as I read 
history, that it should continue, until, as Mr. Lincoln said, 
four years later, " all the wealth piled up by the bondman's^ 



17 

two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, 
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be 
paid by another drawn with the sword." But the wisest and 
the best of men made serious mistakes in those times. Many 
under-rated the duration and the danorers of the struo-ale. 
Secretary Seward proposed to the President a fantastic and 
impracticable course of action, which practically involved 
war with half of Europe, of which war the Secretary was 
to be the director. Mr. Lincoln stood between two classes of 
extremists at the North, — of whom one was eager for the 
" blood-letting " to begin, and the other ready to sacrifice 
anything, even to self-respect, for the sake of saving, only 
in form, the union of the States. 

He was not carried off his feet. I think he foresaw 
pretty clearly the actual course of events. He had been 
declared elected with every formality prescribed by law and 
precedent, peaceably inaugurated, and held his office by a 
perfect title. How scrupulously and moderately he intended 
to exercise its high functions, he set forth in calm, concilia- 
tory, and sincere fashion, as well as in a most admirable 
spirit of toleration and patriotism, in his first inaugural. At 
its close, in one brief paragraph, he rose to actual majesty of 
thought and expression : — 

"Zam loath to close. We are not enemies, hut friends. We 
must not he enemies. Though passion may have strained, it 
must not hreak our honds of affection. The mystic chords of 
^memory, stretching from every hattle-field and patriot grave to 
every living hearthstone all over this hroad land, ivill yet sivell 



i8 



the chorus of the Union^ when again touched^ as surely they 
will he, hy the letter angels of our nature.'^ 

The irresolution of the outgoing administration had left 
it possible to hold, — or, at the very least, to divide, — the 
border states. The mad and headlong course of the Southern 
leaders themselves also contributed powerfully to this end. 
To this purpose the President immediately addressed him- 
self. " You can have no conflict," he declared, " without 
being yourselves the aggressors." So strictly did he adhere 
to his determination of compelling the Confederates to ini- 
tiate the conflict, that, when it was perfectly evident that Vir- 
ginia was committed to the Southern cause, even before the 
passage of her ordinance of secession, he would not allow 
United States troops to cross the Long Bridge at Washing- 
ton and step upon the " sacred soil " of the Old Dominion 
until her withdrawal from the Union had been formally 
voted. The forbearance, of which this was a type, while it 
seemed to involve the loss of time and was sharply con- 
demned, was justified by the result. For, although after the 
assault on Sumter, four more states did secede. West Vir- 
ginia was saved. East Tennessee was saved, and Maryland, 
Kentucky and Missouri were held in the Union. The mate- 
rial results of the policy which prevented them from going 
solidly with the South were not small, as may be seen from 
these figures : — 



19 



Kentucky, 

Missouri, 

Massachusetts, 

Maryland, 

New Jersey, 

Iowa, 



Population 

1860. 

1,155,000 

1,182,000 

1,231,000 

687,000 

672,000 

674,000 



Troops furnished to 
Union Army. 

71,000 
86,000 
126,000 
41,000 
57,000 
68,000 



The moral results were even greater ; for the rebellion was 
confined to the states most distinctively the slave states, and 
the war thus made to appear, not only to the North, but to 
the world, to be a slave-holders' war. 

The sagacity with which he began his administration is 
typical of its entire course. We cannot discuss it in detail. 
We must give our time rather to a view of what became its 
supreme feature. As, in analyzing the events of those times, 
slavery is found to be the important element, its destruction 
the crowning glory and triumph, and other events important 
as they bear upon this, — so, in the career of Lincoln, his 
attitude towards slavery and his relation to its final abolition 
are the most interesting and vital features. He was not an 
Abolitionist, as that term was used in the years before the 
war. The typical Abolitionists were essentially fanatics, who 
are governed, as has been well said, more by imagination 
than by judgment. They are extreme idealists, feeling no 
responsibility for ways and means. They take account 
of men as -they ought to be,— not of men as they really are. 
I have no philippic to pronounce against such men. They 
are valuable for the creation and development of popular 



20 

sentiment and for awakening the moral sense of the people. 
Their peculiar type of mind has been the cause or spring of 
the great steps which the world has made in social and relig- 
ious progress. John Brown, wild and chimerical as was the 
scheme which he attempted to carry out at Harper's Ferry, 
yet rendered an inestimable service to freedom, and perhaps 
hastened by many years the overthrow of slavery. Yet, in 
itself considered, it was as foolhardy an undertaking as ever 
occurred. Its value lay in its indirect and remote effects, 
which were perhaps not foreseen clearly even by Brown 
himself. 

Lincoln did not belong to this class. We may well thank 
God that he did not. He was a statesman, whose province it 
was to secure results, to find ways and means, whose fitness 
consists in knowing when to strike and when to forbear. 
His purposes were pure and patriotic, his perception of the 
moral wrong of human slavery was clear, but he saw the 
utter futility of moving too far and too rapidly in advance 
of the people. The secret of his final success lay in his 
understanding of the temper of the people, in knowing when 
they were ready for a great step. His eyes had early been 
open to the blighting and blasting effects surely wrapped up 
in human slavery, — the " sum of all villanies," — the wooden 
horse of our political history, never so dangerous as when it 
seemed to be bringing gifts. It was its insidious nature in 
this respect that blinded so long the moral sense of the indus- 
trial and commercial classes, and gave it the mighty support 
which it received in the North. During a visit to New 
Orleans he had received his impressions of the peculiar insti- 



21 

tution, and those impressions are on record. While a mem- 
ber of the Illinois legislature he had signed, with only one 
other member, a pi'otest against a substantial refusal to 
receive " abolition " petitions. The protest was a mild one, 
but it illuminates the situation, for he was then a young and 
ambitious politician. While he was in Congress he intro- 
duced a bill providing for the gradual abolition of slavery in 
the District of Columbia. The passage of the Kansas-Ne- 
braska act in 1854 had a profound effect upon the public 
sentiment of the Northern States. Its first political sequence 
was the practical disappearance of the old Whig party, which 
had been overwhelmingly defeated in the presidential election 
of 1852. Its next was the formation of the Republican 
party. It was recruited from the great mass of the northern 
Whigs, from the free-soil Democrats who had refused, espec- 
ially in New York, to support General Cass in 1848, and it 
particularly attracted to itself, by the nomination of Fre- 
mont, an immense number of the young men of the country, 
and thus laid the foundation of its success in 1860. Of this 
new party Mr. Lincoln became a member. In common with 
the great majority of its leaders, he felt himself bound by 
the limitations which the constitution had established, and 
which the whole course of our political history had con- 
firmed. Throughout his memorable debates with Douglas, in 
1858, his speeches, looked at from this distance of time and 
event, seem singularly moderate ; though, as w^e know, some 
of his friends did not then so regard them. His constant 
contention was that the nation certainly had the right to 
prevent the extension of slavery. He reiterated and empha- 



22 

sized the obligation of the national government and of the 
free states to let it alone where it existed. He even depre- 
cated the manner in which the abolition agitation was some- 
times carried on. He claimed the right of the v/hite race to 
its superior position. He did not dispute the constitutional 
obligation to return fugitive slaves. The platform upon 
which he was nominated for President in 1860 was to the 
same purport, and it received his full approbation. 

At the same tirpe he recognized, even earlier and more 
clearly than Seward, the " irrepressible conflict " between 
freedom and slavery. He certainly saw farther and more 
clearly into the real cause of the difference between North 
and South than did most of his contemporaries ; but perhaps 
not even he fully appreciated the logical result of the mo- 
mentous declarations with which he opened his campaign 
against Douglas. The " irrepressible conflict," as he saw it, 
was apparently to be carried on by moral agencies, and when 
he said that he expected to see the Union endure, although, 
in his opinion, it could not endure, " half slave and half 
free," his probable expectation was that with the lapse of 
time, if slavery could be confined for the present to the 
states wherein it then existed, these moral agencies would 
work its destruction. 

This result might, indeed, have ensued. The Southern 
leaders themselves apparently thought there was something 
in this view. They justified their rebellion upon very lofty 
grounds, whose sincerity we need not attempt to estimate ; 
nor is it possible to judge with entire confidence how their 
eyes were blinded to the wrong of extending slavery by the 



23 

certainty that the political power of their section would 
surely wane rapidly when once it was certain that there 
never would be more than fifteen slave states. They illus- 
trated again the truth of the familiar adage that the gods 
first make mad those who are marked for destruction. For 
at a time when the feeling of the North was aroused against 
the institution as it never had been before, they deliberately 
broke up the Democratic party and thus made inevitable the 
election of the Republican candidate for the presidency. 

Lincoln had gone to the farthest point any anti-slavery 
man, who believed that Congress had a right to control the 
legislation of the territories, could go. His opposition to 
the extension of slavery was tempered with the most pro- 
found and scrupulous regard for constitutional and legal 
rights. The views he had expressed again and again before 
the election he repeated more than once on his journey to 
Washington, and formally and emphatically declared in his 
inaugural. These views he consistently adhered to. He 
would save the Union, he said, — this was his supreme pur- 
pose ; he would save it with slavery, if he could ; but he 
would save the Union. He would not strike at the institu- 
tion of slavery in the states unless convinced that this step 
could be made a means of ensuring the salvation of the 
Union. He called down upon his head the bitterest denun- 
ciations of extremists, who would have destroyed slavery at 
any cost or risk to the Union, by delaying his consent to the 
employment of negroes as soldiers, by annulling the emanci- 
pation proclamations of Fremont and Hunter. He did assent 
to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 



24 

1862. And he took clear cognizance of the constantly grow- 
ing anti-slavery feeling of the North. And probably it did 
not lessen the tendency which was drawing him towards a 
policy of emancipation that strong anti-slavery steps would 
render more unlikely the constantly dreaded interference of 
England in behalf of a confederacy whose corner-stone, as 
Alexander H. Stephens had said, was slavery. Doubtless he 
was convinced in his own mind, long before the emancipation 
proclamation was issued, what the result must be. And when 
the time came, and he saw, with his clear vision, that the 
people of the North were ready for the stroke, and that it 
would be indeed the master move in the great combination, 
there is absolutely no doubt that he put his hand to the doc- 
ument with a greater and more solemn satisfaction than he 
performed any other act during the whole war. At last his 
reason and his conscience were at one. The imagination of 
the idealist and the judgment of the practical statesman 
were no longer at variance. As he himself characterized it, 
" It is the central act of my administration and the crowning 
event of the nineteenth century.''^ 

It is one of the strange contrasts which one may some- 
times find in history, that, in our days of small things, of 
beginnings, of the feeble and uncertain steps of the nation's 
childhood, the leader and exemplar of the cause was a man 
of the aristocracy, if any such existed ; of wealth and fam. 
ily ; of social standing and of gentle blood — while, on the 
other hand, when days of wealth and power had come, when 
material greatness and industrial splendor were clearly fore- 
shadowed, and the furnace was seven times heated with rage 



25 

and hate and passion ; when the rights, not of a nation, but 
of individual man, were at stake, our leader was one sprung 
from the lowest social stratum, without early advantages, a 
native of the wilderness, self-made, self-raised, self-sustained 
— the type, not so much of new Americanism, as of true 
Americanism, which guarantees to every man an opportunity. 
Our first conflict was the English strife for civil liberty, for 
the rights of the mass of the people,— considered collectively, 
— the strife which had made English soil red with good blood 
in memorable battles for five hundred years, transferred to 
the new world. George Washington was distinctively an 
Englishman of the type of Hampden and of Pym, de- 
voted with all the ardor of which the slow but sturdy 
English character is capable, to the cause which he 
represented. But in Lincoln was represented another 
type, — that of genuine Americanism, not alien to, but 
an evolution from, his English ancestry, including its 
virtues and many another splendid quality. This 
development was made possible by his environment. Here 
in New England, and along the Atlantic coast, the very 
names brought by the English settlers and conquerors re- 
main, to remind us, that, whether we like it or not, we are 
still more English than anything else : and, notwithstandino- 
almost three hundred years of distinct life, English ideals 
and manners, and prejudices still abide. But when you pass 
the tier of states upon the Atlantic seaboard, you find a style 
of name even, brought not from the Old World, but native 
to the soil ; and you find a type of ideals and of methods 
far different from those which are prevalent with us. We 



26 

are fond of sa3dng that it is tlie same blood, of pointing out 
how many of those communities were settled from New 
England, and of declaring that the Old New England still 
lives in the great Central States. But even the blood has 
been largely mixed, and at the present time it is again en- 
countering a mighty stream drawn from the same Teutonic 
sources, — from Germany and the Scandinavian countries, — 
which made the England of a thousand years ago an Anglo- 
Saxon nation. This element was not indeed visible in the 
early part of the century, — I refer to it to show how the 
work begun then by transplanting is being carried on in our 
own times, — but the great wilderness was there, and it is no 
new suggestion that any people removed to such surround- 
ings are greatly modified and changed. The strong tinge of 
melancholy which was so noticeable in Lincoln's character 
has been ascribed to this influence. The typical American- 
ism, differentiated from other races and nations, is to spring 
from the mighty central section of this country ; of this 
Abraham Lincoln was the first, the most conspicuous, — shall 
I say, the ideal ? — product and sample. We look forward 
confidently and proudly to the work which we believe this 
true Americanism shall do for the human race. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, five days after the assassination of Lincoln, 
^aid that the serene Providence presiding over the destinies 
of nations and taking little account of individuals, time, war, 
or disaster, selects for each great work the nation best fitted 
to perform it. The work appointed us was set forth with a 
iulness beyond the ability of that time to achieve in the 
Declaration of Independence. For the removal of the great 



27 

stumbling-block between promise and performance, between 
ideal and real, we are indebted, under God, to Abraham 
Lincoln. And what a crown that achievement is in itself ! 
A race redeemed from bondage ! The possibility of man- 
hood for four millions of men and their descendants to the 
remotest generation ! And what a consciousness of shame 
and reproach removed from our own race ! The abolition of 
slavery was a redemption hardly less to whites than to 
blacks. The issues of our modern political contests some- 
times seem petty and trifling,— but how infinitely better that 
we should be divided over tariffs, and hours of labor, and the 
coinage of silver, than that we should be debating with hot 
words and angry hearts whether man may openly buy and 
sell his brother man! What a step this marks of noble 
achievement. And we owe it, let me say again, to Abraham 
Lincoln ! 

I have no superstitious regard for great men, and no spec- 
ial reverence for the past, as such. I am conscious of no 
bias derived from early training or from the settled political 
views of mature life which would lead me to over-estimate 
the character of Abraham Lincoln or to exaggerate his ser- 
vices to mankind. Your thought concerning the points 1 
have discussed may not be precisely the same as mine, but I 
do not think we can widely differ in our conclusions. We 
who remember the events of the civil war with any deo-ree 
of distinctness know how the hopes and fears, the affections 
and the hates, the passions, the emotions, and the purposes 
of our people were stirred and swayed. Neither can we be 
ignorant how sadly and uncharitably men sometimes mis- 



28 

judged even their own neighbors and kinsfolk. We are 
grateful to-day that so much of the bitterness of that strife 
has been softened and so many of its errors corrected. The 
sacrifices and the prayers of those who fought and endured 
have been crowned with the re-establishment of a union, free 
from the corrupting influence of human slavery, and by the 
confirmation of a better understanding and a kindlier feeling 
between the North and the South than had existed for many 
years preceding the war. For much that now remains to be 
done, the soothing and healing influence of time must be in- 
voked. We may not see it perfected ; but we see progress 
made from year to year, through education, through indus- 
trial and commercial relationships, through the breaking of 
old political combinations, through the influence of new 
issues, through the rising of a new generation, through com- 
mon struggles in behalf of liberty, and through the develop- 
ment of a new appreciation of national unity. 

For the achievement of so much as has been accomplished 
in thirty years, we are again indebted to the broad, kindly, 
and tolerent spirit which animated Mr. Lincoln, and which, 
at his tragical death, was so forcibly and so touchingly 
brought to the understanding and the comprehension of our 
people. That understanding has made him hardly less an 
object of affection and regard in the South than in the North, 
and it has given us a common interest in this respect without 
distinction of party, or sect, or descent. 

So his greatness is sure to be more and more recognized as 
the years go by. That greatness is not due, in our eyes, to 
the greatness of his opportunity. For what is a great oppor- 



29 

tunity to a small man ? It serves only to make his little- 
ness more apparent. Great opportunities are matched by 
corresponding difficulties. This was the experience of Mr. 
Lincoln. He was misunderstood by those who should have 
known him better. He was hated by millions,— he, who 
had '^ malice towards none." He was slandered in ways and 
to a degree which has found no subsequent parallel. He was 
caricatured as a boor and a buffoon, and that gentle humor 
which preserved him for his great task was made to find its 
only counterpart in the gross indifference of the fiddling 
Nero. By foreign nations he was not comprehended and 
was therefore malio-ned. 

He endured it all with patience and without animosity. 
In all the records of his speeches and his writings, you can 
find no word of bitterness, no trace of repining, no lack of 
charity and good-will. And his faith did not waver. Gen- 
eral Grant tells us that, in his belief, there never was a time 
when Lincoln did not believe the cause would be trium- 
phant. 

Such a spirit conquers the world and compels its own 
recognition. It is the unfailing symbol of the highest type 
of greatness ; it makes the human race eternally its debtor. 
That debt we gratefully recognize ; the reverence due we 
gladly pay. So, with a profound feeling of confident assur- 
ance, we point to this type of true Americanism, to this 
anointed prophet of human freedom, and we feel an assured 
pride in the character and the deeds of our countryman. He 
suffered in our behalf ; he bore our griefs ; he won our cause. 



30 



" We rest in peace, where these sad eyes 

Saw peril, strife, and pain ; 
His was the nation's sacrifice. 

And ours the priceless gain." 



.B S '12 



